Democratizing automation with citizen developers: navigating the pitfalls and opportunities

The uncertain economic environment and rapidly evolving technology landscape have pressured organizations to improve efficiency, innovate, and adapt. Citizen developers have emerged as an approach to bridge the gap between technical expertise and domain knowledge. Those self-taught deeply understand their industry’s needs and pain points, enabling them to create tailored applications that address specific challenges. Citizen developers are a vital resource for organizations looking to streamline processes, increase efficiency, and reduce costs, whilst supporting business innovation and agile change. One can trace the emergence of citizen developers back to end-user computing in the late 20th century. However, the rise of the internet and subsequent development of low-code and no-code platforms, increasingly assisted by AI technologies, are democratizing software creation.

Who is a citizen developer?

Citizen developers are non-technical employees who take the initiative to develop software applications or automate business processes without relying on IT departments or specialized software engineers, if not for training and support. They use “low-code” tools and technologies to address personal or workgroup-level enterprise development and automation challenges that are key for them but not critical enough at the enterprise level to deserve the attention of central IT.

These individuals possess a deep understanding of their industry’s needs and pain points, enabling them to identify opportunities for development and automation that can drive efficiency and productivity within their organizations. Citizen developers are business technologists (that is, they have “enough” IT skills) who can and want to address development and automation tasks alone, by using low-cost or free cloud services. Characterized by the low cost of entry, short learning curves, minimal training requirements, intuitive (often conversational) UIs, and AI-assisted high productivity, these tools empower users to excel.

Their goal is to:

• Improve efficiency by automating their own or their workgroup’s formal or informal processes
• Respond quickly to opportunities and threats (business agility)
• Introduce new creative ways of doing their job (innovation)
• Collect and aggregate the data they need to steer their activity or make operational decisions (insights)
• Interact with the enterprise systems in a simplified, optimized, and personalized way (experience)

The key point is that they are enabled to achieve these goals at the micro-organizational level (department, workgroup, or even individual), whereas the central IT department focuses on the macro, organization-wide issues.

The implications

Enterprise automation technology providers increasingly offer tools tailored to citizen developers, making them easily and widely accessible through low-cost or free cloud services. While citizen developers can improve micro-efficiency, business agility, and innovation, they also present risks, such as security, compliance, privacy, data quality, duplication of efforts and technologies, and mounting technical debt.